


Dreamtime

by Dark_Star



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 13:53:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Star/pseuds/Dark_Star
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A person born and brought up on Earth -- or any other planet -- may perceive space as something frightening, alien, comfortless. But think of those born and brought up on ships and stations, of those who got used to cosmos and came to love it. A lonely death in vacuum is a special kind of nightmare for a spacer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreamtime

**Author's Note:**

> I have to admit: I am one of those hopeless romantics who read not fairy-tales, but rather encyclopedias about space before going to bed; I am one of those who grew up but still regret they couldn't become astronauts. I wanted to write a piece about Shepard's death in the very beginning of ME2, and in the end, my love for stars manifested itself through this text.

_We're made of star stuff.  
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.  
Carl Sagan_

\- Shepard!

The flash was so bright that it momentarily dazzled her. For a moment she thought she was deafened too, as the speakers went mute; the static, Joker’s distant scream, and a low groan of the suffering ship stopped all at once. A cold, deathly hush sealed up her ears.

Ripley opened her eyes.

When she was five years old, space appeared to be both a mystery and a revelation to her. Bearded navigator Dallas, an aged and distant Cepheus, used to tell her stories about stars, mixing up truth and fancies, facts he had once derived from popular science magazines and ancient myths. There was a time when he had sent his teenage daughter away from the ship, so he had chosen to love Ripley in place of that woman who had married, left for the Achaean Sea, and never was the one to write or call him first.

When Ripley was fourteen she convinced Hudson, the general’s son, to help her pull on a heavy spacesuit cocoon and to throw her out of the airlock without any permission, or their parents’ knowledge, or even a safety belt. That was an old way to crown astronauts, or so she read – to leave the recruits hanging in the darkness among the stars and to pick them up later, wailing and wriggling, shocked and crushed by how endless and inhuman the universe is by its nature. Space was putting them to the test, and not everyone could pass it with flying colors. Ripley didn't have a chance to undergo an ordeal since Hudson got cold feet, so there was not a trial in open space, but a difficult talk behind closed doors instead. Ripley ought to feel ashamed, but that was just the first one of her silly teenage riots, and there was no way to lock that Pandora’s Box after opening it.

When Ripley was eighteen years old, space had been hiding from her behind the blue skies of Earth. She discovered astronomy popularizers and started a two-centuries-long journey from the last lectures of the Besara Institute of Cosmic Studies to charming but terribly old-fashioned television series by Carl Sagan. Lights of Earth were brighter than any stars, so Ripley used to visit a planetarium just to look at its artificial sky filled with silver dots. She was a wandering Ulysses who, having been lost in the seas, visited the upper deck of the ship at night to look out for distant lights of lighthouses, to imagine being close to dear Ithaca. Space was a homecoming.

By the time she was twenty-nine Ripley had visited hundreds of star systems, left comm buoys on tens of planets and was pretty good at reading professional star charts, much to Pressley’s delight. She had exited the airlock not once nor twice, but many times already, and silent unbowed space still managed to amuse her. When a human loses a last foothold, space gives the body a cold welcome, akin to one a grain of sand can expect from heavy waves of an ocean. There, being open to neutrino streams and solar winds, one comes to realize just how useless and misplaced hot breath, blood pulsing in the temples and one's stubborn heart are. Any word, any motion of useless human limbs, any sign of chaotic and absurd organic life becomes unnecessary as one is slowly freezing through, ready to start an endless journey to nowhere, and if there is something that prevents one from becoming a heavenly body, then it's a mere umbilical cord of a safety belt between a human and a mother ship.

Shepard's hands went down and touched her girdle, but its fasteners were empty and loose. She wanted to scream.

The _Normandy_ was floating in front of her, maimed and wreathed in flames. The attack of the enemy vessel turned her into a supernova, and all the little things Ripley considered to be hers were turning into ash in her white-hot core: a photo of her parents; a model of an unnamed ship which accompanied Ripley since she was eight; her Spectre insignia, her cobalt blue Alliance uniform, her old reliable M35 Mako and the full map of explored stars.

Ripley had a moment to reach out for them – and then _Normandy's_ skeleton cracked, twitched and split up, revealing its chaotic interior. Skin-plating tore apart at the seams, uncovering steel girders underneath, all fractured and bent. No intact display was left on the bridge. A blue wave ran over the ship from the bow to the stern as if Normandy was letting out her last sigh – _I want to live_ – before finally giving in and splitting in two.

The fire raging in the engineering module finally suffocated and died away, so the last red flashes went out with it. Torn cables spat sparkles. The ship’s eye sockets which held life boats a while ago were blind and empty now. Bits and pieces of ship’s skin floated around in a dead and heavy silence, and the only sound filling Ripley’s ears was her own thumping heartbeat – but there was also a sensor crying out, its alarming and distant _beep_ coming from the other edge of the universe.

The sensor! Ripley twitched and wriggled and grabbed a faulty hose, trying to pull it to the air valve on the back of her helmet, but the hose kept on teasing her, slipping out of her fingers like a snake. _Come on_ , Ripley thought, clenching her teeth and feeling the sweat coming out on her forehead, come on. But she just couldn’t find the latch, and her fingers kept slipping. Stars were jumping right before her eyes, white dots turning into strings, and Ripley suddenly realized that this is – _I don’t want to die_ – the end.

What, an end like this?

 _I am a spacer_ , thought she. We spacers are born on board, in-flight, in cramped cabins in the very womb of the Galaxy. We have seen blue skies and white clouds of yours in movies and picture books, but space is something ours, something native and comforting as a cradle is for a child. Space isn't a handful of stars visible from Earth, it's an untamed world, and in comparison with it, one comprehends how small this entity named human is. We appear from these depths and we return back as sarcophagi with our lifeless bodies emerge from airlocks, but no one wants to be buried alive – no, not like this, anything but this – no one wants to be buried alive in this emptiness and silence.

Leaving Shepard one on one with stars was possibly the last and worst mockery of fate, but Ripley didn't have any strength to snarl in response; what a shame. Her heart was thumping against her ribs so atilt that it was painful. The sensor was still crying. Ripley fought since she was accustomed to resist till the very end, to resist and to win, but a cold lump had already formed in her throat, and her fingers squeezing the hose were going numb. A whitish haze started leaking through and accumulating on her gloves. A deep breath – _I don't want to die_ – an effort – and another breath. And another one. And another one.

The corpse of the _Normandy_ floated in front of her, heavy and broken, already caught by the gravity of the dark hazy planet underneath. An alien sun rising behind Ripley’s back was gilding the planet’s edge. Every breath was an effort. Had it been easier for her to see the pale blue dot of Earth, or maybe a promised Terra Nova? How easy can death be? Every breath was a struggle. Everything went dark before her eyes and pain raged in her chest, yet Ripley was still fighting for each gulp of air: at a moment like this, her will to live was still stronger than despair.

Some important thought was throbbing on the very brink of her mind in time with her irregular pulse, was thumping in her temples, pounding in her fingertips, but her fading consciousness wasn’t able to catch it. It was late, way too late – her heart was on the point of bursting, her lungs were clogged up with star dust and there was no air to breathe, and she felt cold, so very cold – how fragile is it, this human life, a tiny spark between existence and oblivion which is about to –

_Oh, God, receive my soul._

The sensor choked and went silent.

_Oh, God!_

A sun rose above the alien planet.

In a moment, sunrays pierced its shaggy clouds. They lit up as gems and jewels, shining amber and bronze, gold and reddish-yellow. Higher, just above the traces of aurora, one could still see splinters of the _Normandy_ , dazzlingly bright in the light of the morning star. The darkness of cosmic night was retreating, slowly, but somewhere above the frontier of the new day one could still see pale diamond placers of the Milky Way. That wasn't a sunrise; that was a rise of a whole Galaxy, of all its millions and billions of suns. It's likely that many of them went supernova thousands of years ago, or rolled themselves up into black holes, or maybe they just silently faded away and were wiped off star charts of civilizations long gone and dead; but their rays carried remembrance of them through space and time so that a morning flaring up above the icy wastes of Alchera was filled with their distant light.

Darkness beyond daybreak may seem dead to some, but any astronaut knows that it is full of life, though not as we know it. Just as troubled ocean waters carry grains of sand and animalcula, so darkness holds and carries countless nameless stars and planets, dust and debris which merge into a milky nebula coiling up in space. Supernovas bloom, astronomers can hear pulsars' neutron hearts pounding – _tha-dump, tha-dump_ , – and solar winds are playing on cosmic strings. Isn't it silly to name a speck of dust, a human, in the face of the abyss where not all supernovas are worthy of being mentioned in star charts, and not all galaxies were given their own names?

The name Shepard, a simple set of sound waves, dispersed in space. As for the body... There are no useless or unnecessary astronomical objects in cosmos; the mute universe embraced the body to split it into atoms and particles, return to its primordial state, scatter across the Galaxy and maybe, millions or billions of years into the future, light yet another star in someone's sky.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sometime after that somewhere on the outskirts of the Solar system the machinery of the old satellite, long abandoned by scientists and the military alike, was able to catch and decode a signal. It turned out to be a recording of a female voice, half-erased by the time and space it had to cross. If someone listened to it – though there was no one to listen – one could still make out certain words:

“The unit was wiped out – _statiс_ – to anyone who can hear me. This is Sergeant Ripley Ellen Shepard speaking, last survivor – _static_ – Akuze. I am transmitting the coordinates now – _static_ – I repeat: last survivor of the unit... This is Sergeant Shepard.”

\- the end - 


End file.
